Revisiting Bialik: a Radical Mizrahi Reading of the Jewish National Poet

SAMI SHALOM CHETRIT Revisiting Bialik: A Radical Mizrahi Reading of the Jewish National Poet A Personal Introduction “Ken Latzipor” Ken latzipor bein haetzim Uvaken la shalos beitzim Uvechol beitza Has pen taier Yashen lo efro’ah Efro’ah zaier.1 “Bird’s Nest” The bird has a nest amongst the trees and in the nest she has three eggs. And in each egg — Hush, don’t disturb!— There lies asleep a baby chick. I can still remember the gestures and expressions of the Yemenite kindergar- ten teacher as she acted out this lovely poem. We followed her in song, joyfully pronouncing the words with a guttural het and ‘ayin that came from deep in our throats since we had just arrived from Morocco and Arabic still rolled off our tongues. When the teacher told us about Bialik, it was clear to me that he was one of ours, a sort of grandfatherly fi gure producing poems for his many grandchil- dren. What can I say? It was love at fi rst sound. This was the fi rst poem I learned to recite and sing as a child in Israel. It was followed by this one: 1 The Hebrew texts of the poems and lectures by H.N. Bialik quoted in this essay have been taken from Bar-Tov, Asaf, ed., Project Ben-Yehuda. The transliterations are mine, as are the English trans- lations, unless indicated otherwise. Comparative Literature 62:1 DOI 10.1215/00104124-2009-029 © 2010 by University of Oregon Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/comparative-literature/article-pdf/62/1/1/237969/CLJ621_01Chetrit_Fpp.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 2 “Parash” Rootz ben-susi Rutz udehar! Rutz babik’aa Tus bahar! Rutza tusa, Yom valayil — Parash ani Uven-hayil! (Bar-Tov) “A Knight” Run, my horse, Run and gallop! Run through valleys, Fly up mountains! Run and fl y, Day and night — A horseman am I, A hero knight! We children — or at least the boys among us — used to roar the song and act it out, charging around, stomping our rubber boots on the ground, and slapping our little equestrian butts just like our energetic young teacher. Of course we had seen neither a horse nor a horseman pass through our gloomy slums, unless you counted the kerosene seller’s old donkey. But I easily and happily imagined the horseman, a heroic knight I would one day become. I did not become a horseman, of course, and I have never ridden a horse, but Bialik accompanied me, as he did every Israeli schoolchild, throughout my studies, and I was always faithful. Thanks to him, I fell in love with language as a young boy: not with Hebrew, but with the language of poetry itself, with its power to create worlds and imbue them with meaning by using just a few words. Very early on I tried my hand at poetry, but it would be years before I would dare to publish my fi rst poem. I survived my high school years in Israel unharmed — which is to say, without any political consciousness, or at least not the kind that would make me read subversively between, or beneath, the lines. The university where I studied literature and politics in the early eighties was still dominated by the Tel-Aviv Struc- turalist school (Mishani), and it was only thanks to an encounter with one radical teacher, Dr. Naomi Kis, who supported the Black Panthers,2 that I began to be skeptical of what I saw and heard. This skepticism increased over the years, until every text that fell into my hands became full of question marks, and that was before I’d even heard of Derrida or deconstruction. As a result, I may never again be able to read Bialik with the excitement I felt as a child. Yet today I feel the need, as a politically conscious writer and researcher, to revisit the writings of the man who remains the most important national poet of Ashkenazi Zionism.3 2 The Black Panthers was a radical social movement founded by second-generation Mizrahim, mostly of Moroccan origin, in Jerusalem. It protested the economic oppression of Mizrahim by the Israeli regime. See Bernstein and Chetrit, Intra-Jewish Confl ict. 3 I use the term Ashkenazi Zionism rather than Zionism throughout my work in order to make clear the association of political Zionism with European Jewry (Ashkenazi). Middle Eastern and North African Jewry had no affi nity or partnership whatsoever with the development of political Zionism, although the religious longings for Zion and the commandment to settle there were also part of these Jews’ lives throughout the Ottoman Empire. See Chetrit, Intra-Jewish Confl ict, Introduction and Chapter 1. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/comparative-literature/article-pdf/62/1/1/237969/CLJ621_01Chetrit_Fpp.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 REVISITING BIALIK / 3 In my fi rst year studying literature in Jerusalem, I read some works by Bialik in a required course. That was where I lost my innocence, but in a most unex- pected way. After class one day, I asked a young Palestinian classmate from Gal- ilee whether he found it diffi cult to deal with Bialik’s national poetry, which was, after all, the poetry that had accompanied a Zionist revolution (cf. Gluz- man et al.) whose main tenets were the settler-colonizing of the country and the dispossession of Palestinians from their land and livelihood (an endeavor Bialik attempted to identify as “enlightened occupation,” even before the term was invented). My classmate responded by reciting Bialik’s poem “El Ha Tzipor” (“To the Bird”): Shalom rav shuvech, tzipora nehmedet Meártzot hahom el haloni — El kolech ki arev ma nafshi kalata Bahoref beozvech meoni. Zameri, saperi, tzipori hayekara, Me’eretz merhakim nifl aot, Hagam sham ba’aretz hahama, hayfa, Tirbena haraot, hat’laot? Hatis’ie li shalom me’ahai betzion, Me’ahai harhokim hakrovim? Hoi meúsharim! Hayadu yado’a Ki esbol, hoi esbol machovim? (Bar-Tov) Greetings of welcome, lovely bird, from the warm countries to my window — my soul yearned for your pleasant voice, in winter after you left my home. Sing to me, tell me, dear bird from the faraway wonderful land, is there in the land of sun and beauty, much evil and hardship too? Have you greetings from my brothers in Zion, my distant brothers yet near? Oh Happy ones, have they known, that I suffer, great pains I suffer? Do they know how numerous my foes stand, so many, oh countless, who rose against me? Sing me, my bird, wonders from the Land, where spring will endure for eternity. But he recited the lines, with slight adaptations, as if they were spoken by a Pal- estinian exile who, yearning for the land from which he has been severed, seeks greetings from his brothers in Palestine with the help of a migrating bird, the asphoura. (Asphoura shares its root with the Hebrew word for bird, tzipor, and migrating birds are a common motif in Palestinian national poetry.) In this reading, the Palestinian exile, who now lives in the cold of the north, tells the precious bird about the tribulations and sufferings of exile and asks her to describe for him the mountains and valleys, rivers and hills, and trees and fruits of Palestine. I had never heard anything like this. I was excited and astonished, since at twenty-two I had never discussed such matters with a Palestinian. In fact, most of my encounters with Palestinians had occurred under completely different cir- cumstances, and mainly when I was a soldier in the Israeli armed forces. It was one of those rare moments of sudden clarity in life, as though someone hands Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/comparative-literature/article-pdf/62/1/1/237969/CLJ621_01Chetrit_Fpp.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 4 you a pair of reading glasses and you are amazed to discover that up until that moment you were reading only one dimension of the text, because you simply could not see the rest. I wanted to tell him that as a Jew I had never imagined such a reading. But, before I had time to say a word, he turned my own question on me and shocked me by asking: “And you’re a Mizrahi Jew [a Jew from the Muslim world]: How do you read such an Ashkenazi [European] poem? Like an Ashkenazi from the cold lands? Or a Moroccan from the desert? What connection do you have with the suffering of the Ashkenazi Diaspora and Christian anti- Semitism?” Still startled by the revelation, I took the book and began to read the poem as a Mizrahi, albeit not yet a politically aware one. My teachers at the time — including some who are today post-structuralist, post-Zionist, and post-modern critics —had never presented me with the possibility of such a reading. A few years later I was introduced to Derrida, who gave me permission not just to deconstruct Bialik, but to tear him apart. I must confess that I did not read Bialik after that, and I tired of studying Ash- kenazi Hebrew literature overall. I did not fi nd myself there; I did not fi nd my voice. The Hebrew that I loved so much sounded foreign most of the time, and that was an especially cruel feeling, because for me it is not truly a foreign language. I only continued my studies thanks to meeting the scholar Ephraim Hazan, who opened a new-old world to me: the Hebrew poetry of North Africa — and primarily of Morocco, the country where I was born.

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